I finally finished my last piece at 5:15 am on Monday morning. Installation began on Sunday and would extend to Monday. Opening reception on Saturday Oct 6, 2-4 pm, 12501 Alcosta Blvd. San Ramon, CA 94583 Show runs until Oct 28.
This beautiful piece is titled Unity by Ellen Bepp, hand papercut, 2017 This October, I am showing 5 new works, all resulting from what I learned on my trip to Indonesia this summer with my parents. It will be a great show. I am familiar with the artists and they…
I’m making new work to be exhibited at Lindsay Dirkx Brown Gallery, San Ramon Community Center. It is forcing me to process the information I received over my visit to Indonesia with my parents this summer. My father has dementia. It was a difficult visit for all of us, frustrating…
This is my grandfather. He was a misunderstood person. My mother didn’t have a lot of good things to say about him. She said everyone knew that he didn’t earn much money. He wrote pamphlets on “theosophy”. My grandmother was the primary supporter for the family of 7, becoming a…
I know people who see the exhibits might look at this post and think… oh she’s just an amateur and they’d be right! I don’t really care to be a professional artist, so I’m just going to be myself. I know I should have an actual website instead of a…
My father’s biological father was a gambler. He gambled away any resources he had that would have been useful to raise 6 kids. So, his wife (my father’s mother) left to go back to China and took half the kids. She left the youngest child, my father, and the oldest…
This is a photo of my mother’s family, placed atop woven strips of fabrics to represent our Chinese and Indonesian heritage. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika is Indonesia’s official motto and is translated from Old Javanese as “Unity in Diversity.” I wanted to refer to the official motto especially when they were being discriminated…
My grandmother was largely the breadwinner of the family. My grandfather wrote booklets which he sold as a subscription. This did not earn very much money, so my grandmother developed skills to make embroidery for women’s shirts. She had 2-3 employees, according to my mother. My mother and her 4 siblings…
My mother resolved in her mind to emigrate out of Indonesia in 1965. It was after six generals were kidnapped and assassinated in a failed coup d’état that was quickly blamed on the Indonesian communist party. This resulted in riots, from which my mother escaped and at least 500,000 people getting…
Here is my small interpretation of how it feels to be Chinese Indonesian. The backdrop is a list of 16 laws that were enacted that directly or indirectly discriminated against Indonesian residents with Chinese ancestry. There were 45 laws made during Suharto’s regime (1966-1998). About 62 laws total were made…